How an Influx of Women Is Changing Medicine - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Medicine is one of the many professions in which women now form the majority of entrants, and in the UK, women will make up a majority of practicing physicians in the next decade.

• But how those women practice, and especially at the consultancy level, the pinnacle in UK medicine, differs from the traditional (male) medical tradition and hierarchy.

• A Royal College of Physicians study found that women hold a significant number of consultancies in general health, paediatrics and public health but just 8.4% of surgical consultancies.

• This is in part because women tend to end up in specialities whose hours are more predictable and controllable; that feature less invasive procedures and use less technology; and that involve more interpersonal contact with patients.

• Also, 30% of female consultants work part-time, and many take sabbaticals. This is largely by choice, not the result of discrimination, the Financial Times said in interpreting the study.

• Over all, 15 years after becoming doctors in the UK, all female MDs average 60% of full-time hours, while men are at 80%.

• Similar results have been found for the US, Canada, New Zealand and parts of Scandinavia.

• But is this something to worry about? The president then of the college, which is the oldest UK medical school, set off a furore in 2004 when she suggested that a preference for more flexible and less rigorous schedules risked diminishing the profession’s cachet and might lessen the quality of consultants.

• The FT expressed concern that more part-timers would mean more patients would see different doctors for the same care and that scheduling for maximum quality might be difficult. Why this would necessarily be a negative and how the situation differs from any other profession were left unsaid.

• But the main issue, is the consultancies, with the FT worrying: “Will the senior echelons of medicine be made up of the best of the best, or merely the best of the rest? If it is the latter, the quality of academic research, medical leadership and ultimately patient care could suffer. “

• But the solution is simple — and already happening: increasing the number of doctors, and then the number but not the hours of consultancies.

• Women made up 57% of those receiving medical degrees in 2007 and yet the number of UK degrees going to men is still rising. And why not? Medicine has a great recruiting tool in how so many women and, increasingly, men can know that after the tough training, one stands a reasonable chance of lucrative and rewarding work — for as many or as few hours as suits.

The FT report